Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
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Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
Ukraine Says Russia Shifting Away From Bakhmut
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Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
https://orthochristian.com/146878.html
A TALK BY METROPOLITAN ARSENY OF SVIATAGORSK LAVRA, IN GENTLER TIMES
Part 1. On the “homestead” Lavra, revival, and an abbot’s prophecy
The Sviatogorsk Lavra is one of the Orthodox treasures of eastern Ukraine. Situated on the high banks of the Seversky Donets River in the Donetsk region, it was frequented by the future St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco, who was born and raised not far from there. It has been housing refugees from the war that started in 2014, when Ukrainian forces began shelling the breakaway republic. With the Russian “special operation” and the Ukrainian army’s response, the Lavra has found itself under fire. In the months of May and June, 2022, due to artillery fire its buildings were damaged, two of its sketes were destroyed, and four monks killed. To honor the heroism and suffering of this famous monastery, we have translated a talk by the abbot, Metropolitan Arseny (Yakovenko) given during more peaceful times.
***
One of the most striking impressions for Orthodox media workers from Ukraine and Russia at the fifth Orthodox Media Festival, which this year [in 2012.—Trans.] took place in the Donetsk region, was a pilgrimage to the Holy Dormition Sviatogorsk Lavra. It would seem that everything was known about the Lavra for a long time, but it prepared many surprises for the forum participants, and everyone will agree that the most impressive one was the communication with the monastery abbot, Archbishop [now Metropolitan] Arseny of Sviatogorsk, Vicar of the Donetsk Diocese. During the talk, which lasted several fascinating hours, Vladyka Arseny impressed everyone with his sincerity, openness and wisdom. Expecting to see a strict father-superior who had managed to turn a ruined monastery into a great Lavra of Ukraine and revive the nearby villages, the Orthodox media reps. unexpectedly beheld an archpastor with a simple view of Divine and earthly things. His stories about Church matters were far from “high style” cold moralizing. Vladyka seemed to be telling a tale, alternating it with local words and popular jokes, with examples of spiritual strength from the Lives of the saints, and funny moments from the life of the brethren and the laity.
On the Lavra and “Sviatogorsk disease”. Twenty years later
True, twenty years is not a very long period. In 1992, the restoration of the ancient monastery, closed in the Soviet era, commenced. Although it began far from the Lavra...
There were only eight of us. When we came here, many fingers were pointed at us that we were a bunch of imbeciles who, at most, would last a couple of months and then scatter. Fr. Tikhon from Lugansk [Hieromonk Tikhon (Ilgov).—Ed.], who is now sitting in the hall, can confirm this.
We had to wash ourselves in the Seversky Donets River, the only shower was in the boiler room of the then sanatorium, and instead of beds we had door panels. It was a time when pilgrims had nowhere to stay; and in fact, the brethren themselves had nowhere to live. And now we can simultaneously accommodate 1,000 people in the Lavra hotels. Since 1859 we had a tradition of providing everything for free.
On his deathbed the first restorer of this monastery, Archimandrite Arseny (Mitrofanov), a spiritual son of the holy elder, Abbot Philaret (Glinsky), left this will and testament: “All pilgrims should be received, accommodated and fed free of charge. As long as you do this, the monastery will not lack anything.” And to this day we do not disobey this blessing; and, glory be to God, everything is still fine...
The town of Sviatogorsk is unique. In the Soviet era it was a resort town with pioneer camps, recreation centers and holiday homes. During perestroika all this was abandoned or destroyed. However, now the recreation centers are experiencing a new lease on life—some spots have been bought out and restored by private entrepreneurs or enterprises (for example, by Stirol the concern of Gorlovka).
If at first people came to us as tourists, then they begin to travel here as spiritual children of our priests. And this happens quite often. Thanks to our monastery many have found new meaning in life or have been healed.
Miracles of healing often occur at the Sviatogorsk Icon of the Mother of God, among which there are many cases of cures from cancer and barrenness. There are many testimonies when families did not have children for eleven to seventeen years, and after prayers at the miracle-working icon they were able to conceive. Parents told their friends about this, and now 15,000 to 20,000 people flock to the icon of the Mother of God for its feast on July 30. As the saying goes, you do not go to an empty well for water.
We could tell you that in such and such a year we restored one thing, and in such and such a year the authorities returned another thing to us. You can see for yourself what has been done. In a nutshell, we can say that when we came here, birch trees grew in the Holy Protection Church, and we removed 2,600 tons of garbage from the Dormition Cathedral. Most importantly, over the twenty years of its recent history the monastery has produced spiritual fathers, whose advice is sought by people from everywhere, and men of prayer for our Holy Orthodox Church, thanks to who tens of thousands of people have become integrated into Church life.
We even have the concept of “Sviatogorsk disease”. In olden times it was said that there was a “Jerusalem disease”: Once a person visits a holy place for the first time, he wants to return there again and again. We have the same here...
The rest is here,
https://orthochristian.com/146878.html
Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
(Remember Gogol was mentioned on this thread recently (about him being born in Ukraine))
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Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
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“Underground cities with tanks near Bakhmut”
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DECEMBER 28, 2022
https://asiatimes.com/2022/12/russia...ar-in-ukraine/
A Krasukha electronic warfare system at Nikolo-Aleksandrovsky training range in Stavropol Territory. Photo: AFP / Denis Abramov / Sputnik
Russia may already be gaining the upper hand over the electronic war in Ukraine, knocking out the latter’s drones and potentially blinding its artillery.
In an article this month in Forbes, David Axe cites a November report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) that Russian electronic warfare (EW) capabilities have knocked out the majority of Ukraine’s drones, with the average lifespan of a small quadcopter drone reduced to three flights, and that of fixed-wing models to six.
According to the RUSI report, 90% of the thousands of drones Ukraine managed to amass before Russia’s invasion in February were shot down or crashed by summer, forcing Ukraine to request replacement drones and fighter jets from the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Axe also notes that Russia’s EW has blunted Ukraine’s intelligence advantages, which enabled its much smaller artillery force to punch far above its weight early in the war.
In a May article for Forbes, David Hambling noted that Ukrainian artillery crews were using various drone models to deliver precise artillery fire against Russian positions, making the most of its limited artillery ammunition stocks by hitting critical targets to maximize the strategic effect.
This advantage may have saved the city of Kiev during the early days of the war. In an article this month for Insider, Michael Peck claims that it was mass fire from old-fashioned Ukrainian artillery that repelled Russia’s February assault on Kiev, not high-tech drones or anti-tank guided missiles.
But Axe says that as Ukraine’s drones are falling out of the sky at an alarming rate, this complicates artillery fire control, removing any precision advantage, increasing the survivability of Russian forces, and allowing them to reconsolidate for further offensive operations.
In addition, Ukraine’s artillery batteries may soon be firing blind, compounding its artillery ammunition woes and further straining US and NATO strategic patience in supplying Ukraine to keep it in the fight.
Ukraine’s air force is also buckling under the effects of improved Russian EW capability. Axe says Ukraine’s fighter pilots were the first to feel the effects of enhanced Russian EW, noting that the pilots frequently discovered that their air-to-air and air-to-ground communications were jammed, their navigation equipment suppressed, and their radars knocked out.
Given these reports, the drone war in Ukraine has potentially changed course. Asia Times has previously reported on the early successes of Ukraine’s Bayraktar TB-2 drones, which inflicted huge losses against Russian forces, and could be behind the most significant casualties of the war, such as the loss of the cruiser Moskva and critically damaging the frigate Admiral Essen.
However, these early successes may have been due to the Russian military’s shortcomings rather than the combat effectiveness of the TB-2. In a report last year by the Turkish think-tank SETA, the TB-2’s success can be ascribed to Russian shortcomings.
The source says Russian forces acted out of their standard tactics, techniques, and procedures that required them to operate under an extensive air defense umbrella with EW capabilities, leaving them vulnerable to TB-2 strikes. In addition, the report states that Russia has yet to establish air superiority fully over Ukraine, which may be due to the latter’s substantial Soviet-era air defense network.
The source says poor coordination and logistics and sub-par maintenance have left Russian forces vulnerable to ambushes and drone strikes. Also, it says Russia’s Soviet-era air defenses are not optimized to deal with the TB-2, as it is small, quiet, does not show a sizable thermal signature, and flies below the minimum detection altitude of long-range radars.
Further, the lack of coordination between Russian combat and EW units may have prevented the latter from using their capabilities to full effect against the TB-2 during the early phases of the Ukraine war.
But in a July article in IEEE Spectrum, Bryan Clark wrote that Russia’s EW was gaining an advantage as the Ukraine conflict turned into a war of attrition.
Clark wrote that during the early stages of the conflict, Russian columns were moving along multiple axes into Ukraine, could not send EW drones over the horizon, and had Ukrainian units interspersed among them. As a result, he says any Russian jamming would have also taken out Russian radios, which forced limits on using EW capabilities.
Moreover, Clark noted that the densely populated areas around Kiev resulted in mixed civilian transmissions and military communications, which prevented Russia from using its EW capabilities to pinpoint and target Ukrainian troops.
He also noted Ukraine’s use of NATO SINCGARS (single channel ground and airborne radio system) jamming and interception-resistant radios to phase out their older Soviet/Russian units, which had back doors built into them for Russian intelligence agencies.
Also, Clark says that during the war’s mobile early stages, Russian forces were unable to advance and change positions quickly enough, resulting in their EW affecting themselves. At the same time, he notes that as Russian troops could not stay for long in their positions, it prevented them from setting up larger, more powerful EW systems to blind NATO satellites and airborne radars.
However, Clark says that as the fighting is now concentrated in less-populated eastern Ukraine and that Russian forces are dug in and no longer thinly spread out, Russia is now using its EW capabilities to detect and degrade Ukrainian communications to support a strategy of incrementally capturing territory using its 10-to-1 advantage in artillery firepower.
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Russia On Brink of Capturing Soledar, Ukraine Bakhmut Defences Crumble, West Rushes Weapons, Ukraine
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